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Spending time at the Springfield Armory Historic Site immerses you in many maps. They are all over the place, helping to tell the story of the Armory over the course of time. Our writing project has a strong partnership with the Armory, where we have run professional development for teachers and summer camps for urban middle school students.

The collage above is some of the maps on display, and below is a poem I wrote about maps.

This is for Write Out, an open learning project sponsored by the partnership between the National Writing Project and the National Park Service.

Last night, we gathered together for the first live event for Write Out, an open learning experience that comes from the partnership between the National Writing Project and the National Park Service with a focus on place-based learning and writing.

In the Map with Me hangout, we talked about the partnership between NPS and NWP, the value of making maps as a literacy device for storytelling, why and how place can inform learning and writing, and what we have been up with Write Out.

We also did a mapping activity in the chat, asking folks to map out an organization they are part of. We then shared our maps during the course of the session (mine is above, showing the bridges between our Western Massachusetts Writing Project at the University of Massachusetts with the Springfield Armory Historic Site and the urban school system and the specific social justice middle school we work with.)

One of the hopes for Write Out — an open learning experience now underway by National Writing Project and the National Park Service — is to use mapping as a way to surface stories, and make connections. I’ve worked with the Springfield Armory now for a few years through our Western Massachusetts Writing Project. I’ve led professional development for teachers and facilitated summer camps for inner city youths at the Armory.

What often surfaces during our dives into primary sources and themes of social justice is the immigrant worker experience, and how many of the workers during the heyday of the Armory arrived in Springfield, Massachusetts, from other parts of the world, and that immigration wave changed the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts forever.

Each pin of each immigrant worker has an image and a voice narration as a video.

What comes to visibility are the stories of these workers, with snippets of their home countries, their families here, the work they did at the Armory, and other odd facts. It’s not much but it’s enough to give a flavor of the immigrant experience, and the map makes those stories more visible than ever.

We have a map theme going for the Write Out project, an open learning invitation now underway from the National Writing Project and the National Park Service designed to support place-based writing. Teachers, park rangers and writers are invited to play with media and writing, and the theme this week is Mapping Possibilities.

If you are not sure how to add a pin of your location (and hopefully a video or an image or some text, too) to the Write Out GeoLocate Yourself Map, we’ve created a tutorial to help with step-by-step instructions. You do need a Google account (unfortunately) and Chrome browser seems to work the best. And you need to be at the map in Google (you can’t add a pin here, in this embeddable version, which is a read-only version)

I’m still not all that satisfied with this, as I was searching for a way to bring together six musical pieces I had written as inspired by my neighborhood a few months ago (and this post has been in my draft bin since then). It was part of the CLMOOC mapping month. I used ThingLink with Soundcloud files (with a map created in another program called MapStack.)

While each musical piece evoked (for me) something of my local wandering/mapping, I wanted to layer the pieces on a map (but didn’t want to give away too much of my privacy.)

You can still hear the songs on one surface map, and I added some text for context. My friend, Wendy, and I were over other possibilities at the time (I had this vision of an AR overlay) and I wonder if yet another project Wendy and I and a few others are planning might give me some ideas to revisit this sound map later on.

I wrote a bit about maps and writing in the classroom over at Middleweb, where I have a regular column about teaching. The piece dovetailed with work being done all November with CLMOOC on mapping in many forms and varieties.

I was thinking of ways to use Google’s My Maps feature with my sixth grade students, as a way to get them to play with mapmaking in connection to literature, and decided to use the travels of a character from the book Regarding the Fountain. Florence Waters travels the world, sending postcards, telegrams and other notes to a classroom in the book, which is very non-traditional in format.

My students had to “pin” her locations around the world (there are more than a dozen places she travels), adding a quote from the book (with page number) and some sort of image to represent either gifts that Florence is mailing to the classroom in the novel, or a representation of the geographic place. (I saw a few students realize they could use animated gifs, which I should have shared out with everyone, giving the pins a little more life.)

Then, I had them calculate distance traveled throughout her entire journeys, using the line draw tool (which gives distance between points). I also showed them how to customize the pins, which many did to represent Florence in the world.

All in all, this was a very successful mapping project, and incorporated geography and math with literacy in a hands-in immersive way, and they were fully engaged in this work (which took longer than I expected to complete but well worth it.)

One change for the future: I should have had students estimate the total distance first, and then compare their calculations to the estimate. Why didn’t I think of that?

Peace (map it),
Kevin

PS – if you use Google Apps for Ed, like we do at our school, you may need to have the technology folks turn on Google maps in the student accounts. My Maps is not part of the walls of the traditional Google suite. We sent a notice home to families about the use of maps.

I am immersing myself in making music, and found myself connected to the idea of a musical landscape, a musical map of ideas expressed not in latitude and longitude, but in sound, melody and rhythm. This project connects back to this month’s Pop-Up Make Cycle with the CLMOOC.

I am immersing myself in making music, and found myself connected to the idea of a musical landscape, a musical map of ideas expressed not in latitude and longitude, but in sound, melody and rhythm. This project connects back to this month’s Pop-Up Make Cycle with the CLMOOC.

This fifth piece, Bird Off Balance, came after watching a bird on the power wires on the street in front of our house, and how it seemed to always be on the verge of wobbling off the wire. It never did, of course. It was always in balance.

I am immersing myself in making music, and found myself connected to the idea of a musical landscape, a musical map of ideas expressed not in latitude and longitude, but in sound, melody and rhythm. This project connects back to this month’s Pop-Up Make Cycle with the CLMOOC.

This fourth piece, entitled Cue the Queue, is inspired by the bird talk I heard while walking our dog, Duke. A flock of somethings were chattering up in the pine trees of the front drive. When we walked close, the entire tree went silent. As we wandered past, the chatter started up again. I imagined one lead bird, with baton, queuing them up. Meanwhile, the beat is that of the dog and I, walking away.